


Pain of Yesterday

by sparklight



Category: Transformers (Dreamwave Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Apocalypse, Resurrection, The Great Shutdown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 08:32:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19808590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparklight/pseuds/sparklight
Summary: It's always darkest before the dawn, and night may last for ages, but the sun will nonetheless rise.Still, for the silence coming with the Great Shutdown as the cybertronians left on Cybertron has to merely await the end, there is nothing that can be done, only witnessed. And while Primus is sleeping, witness he will.





	Pain of Yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> This touches on something that was only commented on in additional material and very briefly referenced by Shockwave in the second volume of Dreamwave's G1 storyline. A quiet, inevitable apocalypse that leaves no survivors, but also no dead.

He could feel the fear.

The Sonic Canyons were moaning with it; the suppressed panic, the grim, fatalistic knowledge of starvation. It swamped every conduit, ran through every cable, vibrated in every single rusting and flaking plate that made up the superstructure. The nightmares not a single one of them would admit to out loud, the hours of staring up at the sky knowing there was not enough energon to carry a single ship out of orbit, unless they were to sacrifice days... hours, _breems_ of further function.

Cybertron was cold down to the core.

Cold and still, charge no longer being generated to functions no one even knew were there.

But they didn't need to know it was there to know something was wrong, and that knowledge made them all the more desperate, made the fighting more vicious than it'd been for hundreds of thousands of vorns.

The silent thunder of their abject despair turned the gold of the sealed Well of All Sparks into shivering pink and Primus rose with it.

It was not awareness, nor intention.

Not truly.

But still a ghost of a spark wandered the crumbling surface, straining under even that gentle pressure, a metaphysical brush of love for the suffering. The Moons above Cybertron, only lit by the faintest of glow from their pools for eons, flickered out as he strode the Plurex flats, bent down over trenches whose edges had long softened from wind and laser fire. Brushed the tops of the helmets of mechs who were fighting more because they had nothing else to do, fighting to, perhaps, wring an ounce of energon from those on what was nominally the other side, give themselves another hour or breem. He touched, and they slept through the energon evaporating.

The generators of the last few cities - Iacon, Kaon, Kalis - stilled as he passed across the span between Iacon and Nova Cronum, and with them the last lights.

He could feel the crying.

It thrummed through him, unknown prayer his children didn't even know how to voice anymore, or to who.

There was no way to reassure them that their slow, sucking descent, the rusting ruin around them that they themselves had created, the craters and corpses and quiet ruins, would not be forever.

He could not tell them that, merely touch the frames and sparks of the cybertronians he passed, some locked in literal battle, as they stilled, one after the other. As the last drops of energy and energon went with the passing specter paying witness to the spreading stillness. The war wasn't the reason, but the war had hastened the cycle, wound it forward in great, record-skipping leaps.

He went from dawn to dawn, one end of the planet to the other, and with him went the last sparks of life.

When the flickering presence finally stood at the opening to the Well again, sunlight bathing the rusted surface of Cybertron and tiny flakes of rust and verdigris dancing on the faint breeze, it took not a thought to reach out to the empty silence, and then press beyond, deeper past the still frames scattered all over Cybertron's surface.

_Sleep. This will take a while._

Heard or not, the disquieting silence blanketing a planet that had never been quiet from its inception softened somewhat, just an edge taken off, as the sliver of Primus eased back into the well, a sigh echoing through the pink-tinted gold behind the seal as it slowly turned to quiescent copper.

And for all the fear and panic, for the silence and the rusting metal, underneath the crumbling plates were new ones, deep inside the planet were reservoirs for energon that merely needed time to fill, to spill over and rise to the surface. With time, dawn would light not a Cybertron crumbling from war, but gleaming like a newly polished invention, and the sleeping sparks would awake to possibility, not despair.

Time heals all wounds, and so too for sleeping gods stabbed by their own unknowing children.


End file.
